Well that's a walk back. You said they were irrelevant to the rest of the market. Now it's a foundry customer couldn't pay any amount of money. Of course. (Well not strictly true, Intel did try to get into the foundry business and did get a customer or two, they just didn't do well https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-...)
> Limiting physics. It is very hard to continue to make devices smaller at historical rates. Nobody is keeping up with the historical 2-year node cadence any longer. And the "nodes" now are marketing smoke and mirrors, anyway; they don't actually mean that device density has doubled.
I don't see how the argument has been made. Limiting physics was limiting in 2015 as well. Progress has still been made, and progress will almost certainly continue to be made for at least several more node, just at a slowing rate.
There is no before/after I've seen that makes a rational case for them previously being able to compete and now not able to. "Moore's law slowed therefore Intel can't get ahead of TSMC" isn't really arguing anything.
A crude approximation is money. Investment in R&D and fabs. So that's something you could argue, but when you look at Intel and TSMC, it's not obvious that TSMC has vastly more money to spend there.
> They cannot publicly pull the plug for two major reasons:
[...]
This is going into conspiracy theory territory. You think they're lying to investors and customers and the US government to fraudulently get subsidies investment and customers?
Look, you said they were going to not attempt to invest in regaining an advantage, and that they would focus on getting the most out of their trailing nodes. That's just not what's happening at the moment. And with the amount of money Intel is making still, I think they would be mad to give up now. I don't know what writing on the wall there is everybody thinks they can see here.
